Overview The World Economic Forum is an international organization that brings together leaders from different sectors like business, politics and academia to help shape global, regional and industry agendas. Last year, visualization.org along with GE put out the World Economic Forum Data Visualization Challenge with the objective of representing the 2010 Global Agenda and "help elucidate the interconnectedness amongst issues, highlight the emerging clusters and catalyse dialogue at the Summit". The winner, Jan Willum Tulp, was awarded US $3,000 for his outstanding submission: World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council Interlinkage 2010. The intended audience was primarily the council members that consisted of individual leaders, organizations, businesses, government members and other decision-making bodies. More importantly, the visualization is useful for anyone interested in economic issues, decision making or interrelationships on a large, global scale. It is particularly relevant to our class as the project attempts to display a wide range of data in a useful and visually pleasing manner.
Regional agenda at a glance
North America's regional agenda as displayed by hovering over it's bar
Strengths Numerous categories and subjects are discussed at an international forum such as this one and the resulting data is extensive and complicated to visualize but the greatest strength of this piece is the designer's ability to show the relationships as simply as possible. The circular grid and "matching" technique boils the categories down to the bare minimum while the line weight and colour add hierarchy to the form. The bars on each category add another level of analysis and colour differentiation between the orange and blues add visual appeal as well as easy identification in terms of the main distribution of councils. Once you've figured out the difference between ranks and agendas, the legend-type linked council section is easy to understand. Additionally, the explanation that follows the visualization is to-the-point and informative, without being bulky or overpowering the actual visual. Also, the fact that it was chosen as the winner in the competition adds value and supports its appeal to the target audience. All in all, I feel it is a very clean and concise visual for showing relationships between numerous categories.
Shortcomings In addition to the ones already outlined by Tulp (as listed here), I feel that this visualization needs more background information to understand the all the links between the different councils. Although it is important to remember that the main audience are council members who know exactly how the forum works, the general public should have more material to read on the ranks and councils to fully understand the project. Names of countries appear as respondent councils and linked councils, which is confusing and the particular organizations or businesses are not named anywhere. The regional and global agenda is relatively straightforward but I found the industry agenda a little more challenging to read. Design wise, I had trouble reading the blue categories because they all cluster together at the end and the font is small.
Conclusion As a student who has not had much experience with the economics and is reading this visualization as someone who takes keen interest in global issues, I feel that despite its shortcomings, it does a great job of portraying very crucial trends and relationships that would otherwise be hard to fathom. The visualizations could be improved if one could click on the blue categories to find the list of council members (governments, organizations, businesses etc.). Additionally, more information on how to understand the relationships could be added by clicking on a certain category. Nevertheless, considering the 3 survey questions and their limitations, this information visualization project delivers very well for the purpose for which it was created. It is rich in content and beautifully designed to meet its objective.
I also found a link to Protovis, which is the tool used to create this piece, and I will be exploring it for my labs/final project.
The World Economic Forum is an international organization that brings together leaders from different sectors like business, politics and academia to help shape global, regional and industry agendas. Last year, visualization.org along with GE put out the World Economic Forum Data Visualization Challenge with the objective of representing the 2010 Global Agenda and "help elucidate the interconnectedness amongst issues, highlight the emerging clusters and catalyse dialogue at the Summit". The winner, Jan Willum Tulp, was awarded US $3,000 for his outstanding submission: World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council Interlinkage 2010.
The intended audience was primarily the council members that consisted of individual leaders, organizations, businesses, government members and other decision-making bodies. More importantly, the visualization is useful for anyone interested in economic issues, decision making or interrelationships on a large, global scale. It is particularly relevant to our class as the project attempts to display a wide range of data in a useful and visually pleasing manner.
Strengths
Numerous categories and subjects are discussed at an international forum such as this one and the resulting data is extensive and complicated to visualize but the greatest strength of this piece is the designer's ability to show the relationships as simply as possible. The circular grid and "matching" technique boils the categories down to the bare minimum while the line weight and colour add hierarchy to the form. The bars on each category add another level of analysis and colour differentiation between the orange and blues add visual appeal as well as easy identification in terms of the main distribution of councils. Once you've figured out the difference between ranks and agendas, the legend-type linked council section is easy to understand.
Additionally, the explanation that follows the visualization is to-the-point and informative, without being bulky or overpowering the actual visual. Also, the fact that it was chosen as the winner in the competition adds value and supports its appeal to the target audience. All in all, I feel it is a very clean and concise visual for showing relationships between numerous categories.
Shortcomings
In addition to the ones already outlined by Tulp (as listed here), I feel that this visualization needs more background information to understand the all the links between the different councils. Although it is important to remember that the main audience are council members who know exactly how the forum works, the general public should have more material to read on the ranks and councils to fully understand the project.
Names of countries appear as respondent councils and linked councils, which is confusing and the particular organizations or businesses are not named anywhere. The regional and global agenda is relatively straightforward but I found the industry agenda a little more challenging to read.
Design wise, I had trouble reading the blue categories because they all cluster together at the end and the font is small.
Conclusion
As a student who has not had much experience with the economics and is reading this visualization as someone who takes keen interest in global issues, I feel that despite its shortcomings, it does a great job of portraying very crucial trends and relationships that would otherwise be hard to fathom. The visualizations could be improved if one could click on the blue categories to find the list of council members (governments, organizations, businesses etc.). Additionally, more information on how to understand the relationships could be added by clicking on a certain category. Nevertheless, considering the 3 survey questions and their limitations, this information visualization project delivers very well for the purpose for which it was created. It is rich in content and beautifully designed to meet its objective.
I also found a link to Protovis, which is the tool used to create this piece, and I will be exploring it for my labs/final project.